Nukes are mostly useless. ICBMs have the dubious use of preventing others from using ICBMs against you. Same with submarine-launched nukes.
If anyone else in the world has a nuclear arsenal,
that is a pretty good use.
I mean, if there was only one nuclear power and they were inclined to play conquistador, the rest of the world would be in serious trouble, one way or the other.
Shit got wild during the Collapse. And the Cod got unfunded.
And then rust-hulked.
I mean.
The Great Lakes are freshwater, so hulls can last a surprisingly long time.
But the
innards would be so rusted out it'd probably be easier to build a new submarine.
That, or the thing might have been cut up for scrap metal at some point. Given how fragmented the US economy is, I suspect a lot of things are being treated as scrap metal because it's easier to find high-grade scrap metal than to actually put together the logistical chain to run a steel mill.
I'm hacking together a set of plans that preserves the spirit of the plans y'all submitted. While I work at that, there's a spirited argument in the Discord which could use resolving at some point for game purposes, so could the thread debate the topic of how easy it would be for a country in your situation to begin mass production of nuclear devices and their delivery systems? Kindly cite sources.
Thanks!
Delivery systems? Well, you need heavy cruise missiles or jet fighters, or ballistic missiles. All of which are difficult, and in the "billion dollar project" range. But doable if we had ten or twenty years to build up to it and rolled well on our 'salvage heavy equipment' checks, maybe.
The actual bombs themselves?
Staggeringly fucking difficult.
The chief obstacle is enrichment of uranium. We could probably secure a uranium mine
somewhere and if we were grimly determined to get uranium out of it even at uneconomical prices, we could. But turning the uranium into bomb-grade fissile material takes a massive refining apparatus and a very large amount of electricity. It took the historical US what would be thirty billion dollars today to build up the early Manhattan Project infrastructure to turn out the first few bombs.
Now, you could shave some of those costs by deliberately avoiding the less efficient methods of making bomb fuel (they tried all the methods at once because they didn't know which would work). But on the other hand, it indicates the scale of the effort. The US also dedicated about one sixth of its then-extant electrical generating capacity to the Manhattan Project and had thousands of highly trained personnel who had spent the entire early 20th century learning advanced math, science, and engineering. Plus, massive amounts of precision-engineered and carefully machined hardware, of types we would now be hard-pressed to duplicate in Chicagoland, I suspect.
Plus,, and we'd be starting about as much from scratch as they were in terms of the actual bomb design because that information is so secret it almost certainly didn't survive the Collapse.
There's a reason countries like Iran and North Korea (which have a
lot more equipment and assets than we do) spend literally
decades on their nuclear program before actually getting anywhere.
...
I'm going to be perfectly honest, I don't think it's realistically achievable. Chicagoland
wishes it had the resources of a country like North Korea right now, and North Korea spent decades while intentionally starving the rest of its population to build up its military, nuclear, and missile programs.
The NCR, depending on how developed they are, might be able to pull it off. New York? I doubt it, not without significant foreign assistance, if only because they probably don't have the resources. Victoria? Well, they might pull it off like North Korea, but the Russians no doubt want to avoid that outcome.
